Breaking Bad

How a Lifetime Show Gave Us TV’s First Pure Female Antihero

Lifetime’s out-of-nowhere summer hitUnREAL, which concludes its first season tonight, has grabbed headlines for its soapy twists and turns and for drawing criticism from Chris Harrison, whose show, The Bachelor, is a clear inspiration. But flying below-the-radar of all this chatter has been the startling development of the show’s electric main character, Rachel. Could this be the long-awaited heir to Breaking Bad’s Walter White? And did we ever expect we’d find her in a Lifetime show?

When we first met Shiri Appleby’s producer character Rachel she was stuffed in the bottom of a limo packed with wannabe reality-show starlets. Lying on the floor between sparkly heels and legs that go all the way up, Rachel, with her mussed hair, relaxed jeans, feminist-slogan T-shirt, and world-weary expression presented an immediately identifiable archetype: Rachel was the one we can relate to. This is the one we root for. Boy, were we wrong. By season’s end, thanks to some twisted writing and a stand-out performance from Appleby, Rachel has become one of the scariest and most manipulative forces on television. In fact, she might just be the purest TV anti-heroine yet.

When the antihero TV trend began around the same time as the so-called Golden Age, it seemed like the unspoken rule was “no girls allowed.” But as the reign of Tony Soprano, Dexter Morgan, Don Draper, and Walter White raged, women like Nancy Botwin in Weeds, Elizabeth Jennings in The Americans, and Carrie Mathison in Homeland slowly began to break in, proving that women could also be both morally bereft and relatable at the same time. Still, the anti-heroine often came with a caveat—some extenuating circumstance that made her machinations relatable. Nancy was trying to support her family; Elizabeth and Carrie are defending their respective countries. These women are justified in their depravity. Meanwhile, some of TV’s most popular female characters, like Empire’s Cookie Lyon or Scandal’s Olivia Pope, are often mislabeled as antiheroes. Cookie and Olivia aren’t antiheroes, they’re straight up heroes pitted against manipulative, villainous men like Lucious Lyon and Fitzgerald Grant.

But Rachel is neither an antihero with a good cause nor a mischaracterized hero. UnREAL co-creator Sarah Gertrude Shapiro—who based much of the show on her own experience as a producer on The Bachelor—cited Breaking Bad as one of her major influences. She told the Huffington Post:

We talk about Breaking Bad a lot in the writers’ room. That’s
definitely something we aspire to—that kind of antihero, but for
women. Tonally, we always calibrate back to, these people get to be
like Don Draper, they get to be Walter White, they get to be Tony
Soprano. And we threw out the word “likability” really early on. We
just don’t care.

Likability is one of those dreaded buzzwords that plagues complicated female characters like Lena Dunham’s Hannah Horvath, (another possible candidate for TV’s greatest female antihero) who is, in the end, merely a flawed human, not a multi-dimensional villain. But while the UnREAL writers’ room may not have been concerned with likability, Appleby, with her doe eyes and cute little face, is someone we want to like. Rachel, the character, plays up that persona while constantly manipulating everyone around her—but particularly the china-doll contestants on the show—into giving her what she wants. Her most oft-used phrase is “as a friend,” which she deploys just before dispensing advice that pushes people right into the palm of her hand.

And Rachel can be a good person. Sometimes. Unlike the scheming contestants on her show, her cut-throat fellow producers, and her heartless boss (played with delicious villainy by Constance Zimmer), Rachel has a heart. We see it clearly when she tries to protect closeted contestant Faith. But we also see her lie to contestant Anna about her dying father and push unstable contestant Mary into a confrontation with her abusive ex. If all of this sounds excessively soapy, that’s because it is. But Appleby’s astonishing performance slices right through the suds.

It’s that push and pull of likable meek persona and terrifying manipulative mastermind that makes Rachel, like Walter White before her, such a compelling character. Repulsive-yet-relatable is a hard combination to pull off, yet Appleby manages. And just like White, Rachel is in this entirely for herself. When speaking with Vanity Fair’sJulie Miller, Appleby described the real-life reality-show producer she used as an inspiration for her character:

I asked her every question I could possibly think of about her job and
what it meant to her and you could see that she really got off on it.
Even though it was something that made her feel ugly at times and made
her feel bad about what she was doing. I think she got a high off the
fact that she could make all of these people do what she wanted to do.
You could feel that it was almost like a hunger inside of her.

When asked about the Walter White comparison, Appleby said, “[creator] Sarah [Gertrude Shapiro] and I talked about it a lot during the first season and she would say, this is the Walter White moment. And just wanting the characters to be ugly and allowing them to make mistakes and do terrible things and get away with it. Showing the dark side of what this world is like, and how ugly it can make you feel.”

Rachel may seem like a far cry from the meth kingpin of Albuquerque. But remember that Walter White began as a mild-mannered chemistry teacher, not the terrifying Heisenberg. Rachel has only started her journey, and if some of her antics in tonight’s season finale are any indications, we’re in for a bumpy ride. Before you question whether Appleby—an alum of a WB teen soap—really has that villainy in her, remember that before he was Walter White, Bryan Cranston was the lovable dad from Malcolm in the Middle. Sometimes the scariest things come in cutest packages.